Microsoft mocks NSA

Software giant Microsoft Microsoft’s Vice President of Trustworthy Computing, Matt Thomlinson has been a little sarky at the NSA’s expense.

Launching Redmond’s new encryption efforts he said that it was a way to help “reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data.” Redmond has been a little miffed at the NSA’s spying antics which have cost it lots of European and Chinese business.

In a blog post, Thomlinson said that Outlook.com “is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound email.”

This will mean that email that travels between Microsoft and other email providers will be encrypted.

Redmond also announced PFS, or “forward security” encryption support for OneDrive. Thomlinson wrote that “OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, our mobile OneDrive application and our sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive.”

In April Google announced that it is offering end-to-end encryption for Gmail and Google Drive to protect customer as it travels between Google data centres.